Peter Owen obituary

Peter Owen said that the book he was proudest of publishing was The Ice Palace by the Norwegian novelist Tarjei Vesaas.
Photograph: John Timbers/Peter Owen Publishers

Peter Owen’s survival as a publisher across 60 years was against all commercial odds. In 1993 he described himself as “one of the few remaining independent publishers specialising in translation”, and at his death aged 89 his mission and position in British publishing remained unchanged.

His list of authors was impressive, if eclectic and not necessarily with their best books. Colette, Apollinaire, Gide, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin (Owen was more interested in their work than their relationship), Paul Bowles and his wife Jane, Boris Pasternak (but not his Dr Zhivago), Tennessee Williams (but not his best-known plays), Hermann Hesse, Marcel Marceau, two early books by Isaac Bashevis Singer, even the American sexologist Shere Hite (for her The Divine Comedy of Ariadne and Jupiter, not her bestseller The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality). Owen’s detractors (and he had a habit of falling out with people) said that the books he published were those that the authors’ regular publishers had turned down.

However, he was a pioneer when it came to bringing Japanese literature to Britain. In 1960 he published Yukio Mishima’s semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask, which made his reputation, but the success of that book meant, as so often happens with small publishers’ discoveries, that Mishima moved on to bigger firms for more money. Not so with Shūsaku Endō, most of whose work he published and whose foreign rights he sold worldwide. Owen thought it a scandal that Endō did not win the Nobel prize in literature. But when asked, Owen never hesitated: the book he was proudest of publishing was The Ice Palace by the Norwegian novelist Tarjei Vesaas.

Owen could even claim that John Lennon graced his list, as he wrote the introduction to the second edition of a book by his wife, Yoko Ono. Grapefruit was her book of drawings and Zen wisdom, originally published in 1964. It did not have anything like the success of Lennon’s own work (particularly In His Own Write). Owen and Ono did not get on. He recalled saying to her: “Look, you are good at writing pop songs and I’m good at publishing, so why don’t you do your thing and I’ll do mine?”

He was born in Nuremberg, Germany, where his father, who was Jewish – the family name was Offenstadt – was in the import-export business; his mother was English. Owen’s father later ran, with his mother’s brother, a small publishing firm called Vision Press. In 1933 Peter, just turned six, was dispatched to live with his grandparents in north-west London and learn English. With the rise of nazism his parents followed. He did his national service with the RAF, before training as a journalist, enthused by the glamour he read about in Philip Gibbs’s The Street of Adventure. But ultimately publishing attracted him more.

London publishing in the years after the second world war was influenced by an influx of imprints whose founders’ origins were European, among them André Deutsch, George Weidenfeld, Paul Elek, Walter Neurath, Ernest Hecht and Fred Warburg. Owen, however, got his first job, as an office boy, through a family connection with the quintessential English publisher Stanley Unwin. There followed lowly jobs with what he remembered as “pretty sleazy outfits”. Paper was still in short supply, but those who had been in the services were allowed a special quota. With that, and a small overdraft guaranteed by his mother, Owen linked up with another rising talent in postwar London publishing, Neville Armstrong, calling the firm Peter Nevill.

The partners had different tastes. Armstrong, recalled Owen, who rarely minced words, “wanted to do semi-crap”, but the firm also published Jean-Paul Sartre, which coincided with Owen’s ambition to do good books no matter where they came from. When Peter Nevill was put in the hands of the receivers, Owen decided the moment had come to go it alone. Initially working from his bedsit, he launched Peter Owen Books in 1951 with “enthusiasm but no great conviction of success on a capital of less than £1,000”.

Muriel Spark, an early editor who had yet to publish her first novel, recalled in her memoirs working part-time at Peter Nevill and then in Owen’s first formal office in Old Brompton Road, South Kensington. She was also secretary, publicity assistant and proofreader, which meant, during her time, books in translation by Hesse, Cocteau and Pavese, which were an education to her and “a joy”. The offices, she remembered, were bleak – “one light bulb, bare boards, a long table which was the packing department”. Owen was always retreating to his own tiny office to take phone calls from his uncles, one of whom worked at Zwemmer, the Charing Cross Road booksellers, and gave his nephew intellectual advice. The other was a psychiatrist.

Owen in turn remembered Spark as a brilliant shorthand typist and as very efficient. She also had literary taste and judgment. She brought Samuel Beckett to Owen’s attention, but he was not convinced (this was before Waiting for Godot). “Beckett was getting on for 50, had never made it,” he recalled. “We had a choice between Beckett and the Japanese [author] Osamu Dazai. Muriel said, can’t we do both? I said we can’t afford both, and chose Dazai.”

He bought the rights to Siddhartha by Hesse for £25 in 1954 after being given the manuscript by a friendly American publisher. This proved to be Owen’s first great success. Later he almost lost Hesse for daring to ask his widow if the title of his 1930 classic, Narcissus and Goldmund, might be changed. Bestsellers as such did not interest him. Far better a steady seller such as The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, which at the time of his death had sold around 100,000 copies.

In publishing circles Owen was renowned for paying minimal advances and, wherever translations were concerned, buying them cheap from the author’s American publishers. He knew that libraries were the biggest market for many of his authors, and until book-buying budgets began to be slashed in the 1980s he showed little hesitation in pricing up his books. He was also a consummate seller of foreign rights.

With his leather ties and jackets invariably worn over checked shirts, Owen was instantly recognisable. Even when he handed over the day-to-day running of his firm to his daughter Antonia, he remained very much in evidence at book fairs such as Frankfurt. In 2014 he was appointed OBE.

He was twice married, first to Wendy Demoulins, who wrote novels under the name Wendy Owen, with whom he had two daughters, and then to Jan Treacy. Both marriages were dissolved. He is survived by his daughters, Antonia and Georgina, and by a son, Benedict, from a relationship with the artist Marion Cooper.